Posts Tagged ‘stephen colbert’

There was no shortage of political signs among the estimated 250,000 people who attended Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity Saturday on the National Mall. Public Citizen’s voice was heard through the 5,000 signs it distributed bearing the winning slogans from its Signs for Sanity Contest.

While Stewart might have been spreading his message on stage, organizations and individuals took to the mall.

From Jon Stewart’s closing remarks at his Rally to Restore Sanity on the National Mall:

“I can’t control what people think this was. I can only tell you my intentions. This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith or people of activism or to look down our noses at the heartland or passionate argument or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear. They are and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus and not be enemies.

We at Public Citizen are strong supporters of rational discourse and would like to thank everyone we met at the rally who signed our petition for a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United ruling. If you didn’t get a chance to sign, you can still do so by visiting www.DontGetRolled.org.

Let’s get this out of the way up front — Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity was insane. If the National Mall had been a bar, the fire marshal would have closed it down two hours before the Daily Show host even took the stage. The Daily Show estimated the crowd at 250,000. I have no idea how they came up with that number but I’m going to go out on a limb and say there were more.

That’s the only certainty about Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear — that no one is going to agree on how many people actually attended.

Every major rally or protest in Washington, D.C. in the last 15 years (since the National Park Service stopped providing crowd estimates) has had differing attendance counts, often by hundreds of thousands of people.

The bigger question and more important one is what impact, if any, did the event have on the people who attended the D.C. rally? Was the gathering nothing more than the world’s largest flash mob? Or will some of the people who traveled from far and near look back upon it as a seminal event in their lives?

So, look for us Saturday and sign our petitions and get one of the 5,000 signs we’ll be handing out. And, most importantly, please don’t stand on the left side of the escalator. We’ve got places to go.

Look for us at the rally! We’ll be decked out in spiffy Public Citizen t-shirts and handing out signs at nearby Metro (subway) stations. Get there early and get your sign before they’re all taken. Then show your Public Citizen pride by holding your sign as high as you can all day. Or, you know, until your arms get tired.

Thanks to the thousands of Public Citizen members and activists who submitted slogans. We really enjoyed reading them!

If Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and their “competing” Washington D.C. rallies don’t have your attention by now, you a) have just woken up from a 25-year coma b) live in a shack in Montana where you are working on your great anti-technology manifesto, or c) are among the 4 percent of the population who truly believes President Obama might actually have been born in the Alpha Centauri solar system.